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Asked: 2021-11-10T13:19:32+00:00 In:

Win98 Boot CD

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I have used a Win98 boot floppy with CD-ROM drivers for many years to solve many problems but now have a friends PC that was sold without a floppy drive? I have spent much time over the past several days trying to get the various options offered on the internet to work but so far none have. I need a simple way to download an image I can burn to a CD or some other method of accomplishing this. Your help is greatly appreciated!

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    3 Answers

    1. Windows 98SE CD’s are Bootable, though the BIOS has to support Boot from Optical drive.

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    2. The only simple thing to it is either you have the software and smarts to burn an image of a boot floppy to CD and then know how to use it or you don’t. http://www.cdrfaq.org/ is a great place to get the smarts. They will teach you about the required software and what is needed in the image to be burnt. Along with other boot files required for CD booting as an emulated A: floppy drive.

      A good hex editor will let you read a floppy to make your own image file with. This is supposed to be a good free one, but I have no experiance with it myself, sorry.
      ftp://mh-nexus.de/HxDSetupEN.zip

      My experiance was that I could not achive this ‘simple’ task until I got a high speed CDROM drive which allowed for the emulated boot device to properly switch to a DOS accessable drive using the standard MSCDEX driver. My slow CDROM drive never did allow it to happen and would always lock up in the middle of the boot process. Fast being 40x or above, slow being 12x. Your mileage will vary. Good luck finding out where the problem is.

      Lee

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    3. I usually use Nero to create a bootable OS disk.
      Go into Nero, select bootable image, then supply the Windows 98 ISO, and then finally supply the floppy and insert it when prompted. (Nero will ask to to select a default El Torito image or supply floppy; select floppy and insert)

      Nero will copy and use the files on the floppy to create the bootable CD; simply copying the Windows 98 files on the CD will not make it bootable. I’ll post back with a screenshot if necessary.

      I have used this procedure to create bootable CDs of Windows 95 as well./

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